Snowflake elastic data warehouse architecture

Snowflake has skyrocketed in popularity over the past 5 years and firmly planted itself at the center of many companies' data stacks. Snowflake came into existence in 2012 with a unique architecture, described in their seminal white paper as "the elastic data warehouse". Rather than have compute and storage coupled on the same machine like their competitors did, they proposed a new design that took advantage of the near-infinite resources available in cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this post, we'll dive into the three layers of Snowflake's data warehouse architecture: cloud services, compute and storage.

> innovative storage features like zero-copy cloning and time travel.

These are not original to SF. COW snapshot cloning has been around for decades, and eg Vertica has had a copy_table function since IDK how long.

Time travel was in V1 of Vertica, and a quick search shows the same feature in DB2 and other platforms.

In case it's not obvious to folks, there is a disclosure absent (I don't think intentionally so, but still remains):

Submitter is also the author and founder of select.dev, a service selling Snowflake optimization.